” It turns out that, while we were all worrying about the mullahs’ nuclear program, the Clintons’ nuclear program was going gangbusters. Kazakhquiddick dominated the conversation on my weekly chat with Hugh Hewitt:

HUGH HEWITT: I’m looking at an extraordinary article – Cash Flowed To Clinton Foundation As Russians Press For Control Of Uranium Company. It’s by Jo Becker and Mike McIntire from today’s New York Times. It’s almost unfathomable that Hillary Clinton would consider running for president after this article comes out, but what say you, Mark Steyn?

MARK STEYN: Yes, I agree. And I like Elizabeth Warren, and I want her to run. And when I say ‘like’, don’t get me wrong – I think she would be a disastrous president for this country, and she would want to turn it into a socialist basket case. But she believes in something, and she wants to do something. And Hillary Clinton is an entirely hollow creation. She is basically just an empty vessel in which the dodgiest characters on the planet pour money in return for favors. And I regret to say her daughter is becoming much the same kind of thing, too. Her daughter’s joined the family on stage with this Kazakh oligarch and all the rest of it. In fairness to Bill Clinton, he likes chasing nymphettes – he’s the only Clinton with a human characteristic…

HH: Now I don’t want to overstate the complexity, but in a nutshell, Russia has cornered the world uranium market.

MS: Right.

HH: They have done so through acquiring huge uranium resources in Canada and the United State subject to review by the State Department was given, and Bill Clinton pocketed a half million along the way, and the foundation picked up two and a half million bucks from interested parties…

I think I’ve mentioned before that, for a while, the US Department of Labor used to call up my assistant once a year and demand to know whether we “worked with uranium”. And once in a while they’d insist on speaking to me personally and I’d say, “Hmm. Let me have a think on that. Did we use any uranium in my Christmas disco single? No, wait, that was bongos…”

And, when they’d gone away, I used occasionally to wonder how many American businesses the vast federal bureaucracy had to harass before they got a positive response to that question. But it turns out that, if the Department of Labor were to call up the Clinton Foundation, which Hill’s impressionable rubes seem to think is something to do with reducing diarrhea outbreaks in Africa, and ask them, “Do you work with uranium?”, the answer is yes.”

” The latest installment in the ongoing saga of shady Clinton Foundation finances is a story involving a deal in which Russians took take greater control of a major U.S. uranium company, Uranium One.

The details are somewhat involved, but the gist is that because the takeover deal involved uranium, a strategic asset, it required approval from then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Around the same time the deal was going through, the Clinton Foundation took millions of dollars in donations from a foundation run by the founder of Uranium One and did not disclose the transaction, in defiance of an arrangement made with the Obama administration to identify Clinton Foundation donors. In addition, Bill Clinton was paid $500,000 by a Russian financial firm linked to the Kremlin for a speech in Moscow as the deal was happening. The New York Times has an extensive report, building on work from Peter Schweizer’s book about the Clinton Foundation’s foreign funding, Clinton Cash, here. “

” Manufacturers will significantly accelerate their use of robots in U.S. factories over the next decade as they become cheaper and perform more tasks, constraining payroll growth, according to a study out Tuesday.

The development is expected to dramatically boost productivity and slow the long-standing migration of factories across the globe to take advantage of low-cost labor, says the Boston Consulting Group report.

” Advanced robotics are changing the calculus of manufacturing,” says Harold Sirkin, a senior partner at the management consulting firm.

A handful of nations, including the U.S. and China, are poised to reap the biggest benefits of the automation wave.

About 1.2 million additional advanced robots are expected to be deployed in the U.S. by 2025, BCG says. Four industries will lead the shift — computer and electronics products; electrical equipment and appliances; transportation; and machinery — largely because more of their tasks can be automated and they deliver the biggest cost savings.

About 10% of all manufacturing functions are automated, a share that will rise to nearly 25% in a decade as robotic vision sensors and gripping systems improve, BCG says.

That’s prodding manufacturers to replace workers. BCG says manufacturers tend to ratchet up their robotics investment when they realize at least a 15% cost savings compared with employing a worker. In electronics manufacturing, it already costs just $4 an hour to use a robot for a routine assembly task vs. $24 for an average worker.”

” Machine-gun wielding battle robots are going to be tested in Russia’s Astrakhan region for use by the country’s Strategic Missile Forces, the Interfax news agency reported Friday.

Major Dmitry Andreyev, a representative for the Defense Ministry’s Strategic Missile Forces, was cited as saying that preparation for the testing is currently in its final stage.

The trials will be focused on “exploring mobile and stationary robotic systems, including those that are responsible for the formulation of remote-controlled means of stealth technology and signaling,” Andreyev said.”

” A woman fitted with a pacemaker has died after passing through an airport scanner in the southern Russian town of Ulan-Ude.

Diana Tolstova, 30, died in the airport minutes after passing through the scanner. Her husband Maxim, 33, said that they had provided papers proving that Mrs Tolstova was fitted with the heart device – which is adversely affected by airport scanners.

” I don’t know what happened but she went through it anyway,” he told Central European News agency.

” When we got to the departure gate she began to feel dizzy and suddenly collapsed.

” A sudden flash of light on a dark roadway over the Sverdlovsk region in Russia on November 14 at about 5:40 pm was captured on a motorist’s dash-camera.The mysterious red and yellow glow suddenly appeared in the sky for about 14 seconds and then faded away.There is no confirmation of the source of this celestial event.

Some local residents have suggested that it was a meteor similar to the one that fell in the Chelyabinsk region in February 2013, which exploded about 18 miles above the earth’s surface, causing damage to thousands of buildings and injury to 1,500 people from broken windows.No damage or injuries have been reported. “

” President Barack Obama provoked fury in the U.S. on Thursday by casually devoting less than a minute to the deaths of 295 people aboard a Malaysian airliner, as he began an often jokey 16-minute speech about the need to expand America’s transportation infrastructure.

There are no confirmed American dead, although it was feared around the time the president made his remarks that as many as 23 U.S. citizens had perished.

Obama declared in Wilmington, Delaware that ‘it looks like it may be a terrible tragedy,’ but not before enthusiastically declaring that ‘it is wonderful to be back in Delaware.’ “

” A husband-to-be combined a gang of bikers and a bit of harassment to stage quite an elaborate proposal for his girlfriend.

A motorcyclist collides with a guy driving a car on the road, and the two pull over. The biker is enraged, pushing the driver around and seeming to yell at him — you can’t hear exactly what’s going on with the aggressive foreign music playing in the background, but exact words are unnecessary. “

” Fully armed NATO and Russian aircraft keep having encounters as the tension between both powers increase. These photos were taken yesterday by RAF Eurofighters over Baltic airspace. They intercepted four SU-27 Flanker fighters and a Tupolev Tu22 Backfire bombers, among others.

The Typhoon aircraft, from 3 (Fighter) Squadron, were launched after four separate groups of aircraft were detected by NATO air defences in international airspace near to the Baltic States.”

” Ukraine’s new president-elect promised Monday to negotiate an end to a pro-Russia insurgency in the east and said he was willing to begin talks with Moscow. Yet he described the separatists as “Somali pirates” and authorities in Kiev launched an airstrike against the militants occupying a major eastern airport.”

” Russia quickly welcomed Petro Poroshenko’s offer for talks, raising hopes that his election will indeed ease the protracted crisis that has fueled tensions unseen since the end of the Cold War.”

” The airstrikes against the separatists in control of Donetsk airport appeared to be the most visible government military operation yet since it started a crackdown on insurgents last month.”

” The Crimean Supreme Council has passed the decree favored by 85 lawmakers. It has also announced that all Ukrainian state property on the peninsula would be nationalized. The document says the Republic of Crimea appeals to the United Nations and to all countries to recognize it as an independent state. Based on the final results of the referendum, nearly 97 percent of people voted in favor of annexation to Russia. Meanwhile Ukraine’s parliament has endorsed a presidential decree to carry out a partial mobilization of 40-thousand reservists, within the armed forces and the newly created National Guard.”

” The drone was flying at about 4,000 metres (12,000 feet) and was virtually invisible from the ground. It was possible to break the link with US operators with complex radio-electronic” technology, said Rostec in a statement.

The drone fell “almost intact into the hands of self-defence forces” added Rostec, which said it had manufactured the equipment used to down the aircraft, but did not specify who was operating it.

” Judging by its identification number, UAV MQ-5B belonged to the 66th American Reconnaissance Brigade, based in Bavaria,” Rostec said on its website, which also carried a picture of what it said was the captured drone.”

” IT specialists and volunteers from Lviv and Kyiv have provided livestreaming equipment to some of the Ukrainian military bases in Crimea as many journalists have encountered difficulties while trying to report from there.

” India has said Russia holds “legitimate interests” in Ukraine, becoming the first major nation appearing to publicly lean towards Moscow at a time it is largely isolated internationally over its military intervention in the Crimean Peninsula.

India’s first official response came on a day Crimean MPs voted to secede from Ukraine and join Russia, prompting the US to activate some sanctions.

National security adviser Shivshankar Menon has said India wants the confrontation between the West and Moscow over Ukraine resolved peacefully. But he added that it also hoped that the interests of Russia and other stakeholders were taken into account.

“ We hope that whatever internal issues there are within Ukraine are settled peacefully, and the broader issues of reconciling various interests involved, and there are legitimate Russian and other interests involved…. We hope those are discussed, negotiated and that there is a satisfactory resolution to them,” Menon said today.

“ We are not sure how Russia can be seen having legitimate interests in the territory of another country,” Roman Pyrih, the media secretary at the Ukrainian embassy in New Delhi, said. “In our view, and in the view of much of the international community, this is a direct act of aggression and we cannot accept any justification for it.”

” Russia cemented its control of the flashpoint Crimean peninsula without firing a shot as markets plunged on Monday and world leaders held a series of crisis talks over the worst standoff between Moscow and the West since the Cold War.

The price of oil surged on fears of an all-out conflict as Russia looked set to send troops into eastern parts of Ukraine, an area with close ties to Russia that the Kremlin has vowed to protect from “ultranationalist forces”.

British Foreign Secretary William Hague opened talks with Ukraine’s Western-backed but untested interim leaders a day after the world’s top industrialised powers threatened to strip Russia of its coveted seat at the Group of Eight for menacing its ex-Soviet neighbour.

Germany offered a rare glimmer of hope by announcing that Russian President Vladimir Putin had agreed in telephone talks with Chancellor Angela Merkel late Sunday to set up a contact group on Ukraine.

Western allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation also said they wanted to send international observers to Ukraine while engaging Moscow in direct talks.”